Behold your wordsmith’s first contribution to The Syncopated Times, a thoroughly charming monthly periodical out of Utica, New York. (“Syncopate Close to Home!”) The April issue contains my review of The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. The book is the culminating volume of …
The Original Cornell Syncopators are a student band that plays in the earliest jazz styles. Their historical acumen is such that they make recordings on Thomas A. Edison cylinders from the nineteen-aughts! I produced a 15-minute audio feature for WRFI Community Radio News enitled: “Time Machine—Recording Hot Jazz on Cylinder.” In May 2019, the band …
On the International Day of Peace, The Progressive magazine’s website published my review of Randy Forsberg’s fascinating book, Toward a Theory of Peace: The Role of Moral Beliefs. I had suggested a clever title for the article—”From the Unthinkable to the Inconceivable”—but I suppose clever titles aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. (If anyone …
“I’ve worked with Roger for ten years and he’s never disappointed me. As a writer on many different educational projects, from encyclopedias to literary criticism to K-12 reading passages, he’s invariably produced copy that’s authoritative, sparkling clean, lively, and engaging. As a news editor he has excellent judgment and a wide breadth of knowledge, and …
The Progressive published my dispatch from the peace movement meetings held in New York May 11-12, 2018 and the state of nuclear disarmament in 2018. You can see a video taken at the “Two Minutes to Midnight” conference on May 12, featuring talks by Noam Chomsky, Medea Benjamin, Zia Mian, and Daniel Ellsberg.
Here’s the link to my career retrospective of media critic and activist Jeff Cohen. It appeared on the cover of the April 18 edition of the Ithaca Times. [article as a PDF screenshot]